To the editor:

The lead story in Sunday’s Journal-World concerns a dismissal of a request to wait until further studies on jail expansion are concluded before deciding on a plan to spend money on expanding the Douglas County Jail.

One only needs to look at New York State, where it’s anticipated there will be a 40% drop in jail population because of newly enacted reforms. In Brooklyn, where reforms were begun in 2017, there was also a decline in crime with fewer shootings and the lowest number of murders in the borough’s history in 2019, according to the district attorney’s office.

These statistics and a proposal for further study on the issue makes me question why the County Commission seems to have decided to approve a jail expansion before participation in these studies is done and completed.

Tom Guba,

Lawrence